Nepal, Jan. 18 -- A recent study highlighted in JAMA Pediatrics has revealed that delaying the clamping of the umbilical cord after birth is likely to be tied to fewer odds of anemia - a condition in which the blood doesn't have enough healthy red blood cells - among babies.
A team of researchers conducted the study with 540 infants. The babies were randomly assigned to either have either delayed cord clamping at least three minutes after delivery or earlier clamping within a minute of birth.
The investigators noted that the newborns with delayed cord clamping had 11 percent fewer odds of having anemia and 42 percent fewer odds of being iron-deficient as compared to the babies who had early cord clamping.
The senior author of the research, who is a pediatrics researcher at Uppsala University in Sweden, explains that if a baby gets clamped early, it will not gain access to the part of its own blood that is still in the placenta. That extra blood could have shielded the infant from anemia and iron deficiency in the first year of life.